Tuesday, 14 August 2012

Mobile Marketing vs Online Marketing

Although many people now consider mobile commerce to be the new face of online selling, many people are still shunning this form or marketing, choosing to stick with traditional methods as they believe it is these tried and tested ways that will bring the best results. Although online marketing is still a strong promotional tool to increase your business's brand and customers, mobile marketing provides you with just as many benefits, if not more.

vs Email Marketing

When you send out an email marketing campaign, you will find that on average, 88% of all the emails aren't even opened by the recipients. If you send out the same message via SMS marketing on mobile phones, 98% of all messages will be opened. As you can see from these percentages, the amount of people who will become aware of your brand and your message is substantially more through mobile marketing than email marketing.

However, although the open rate for mobile marketing is much higher than in emails, you may find that the percentage of those people who do open the message, tend to read the information in the email more than they would do in the mobile message. Generally, most mobile users have the predisposition that if they receive a text message that is not from a friend or someone they know, they instantly open the message and then delete it straight away without reading it. In comparison, people who open up an email marketing message, tend to do so after becoming interested in what the email contains, through the subject heading. As opposed to opening the text message to then delete it, people open up emails because they wish to find out what information the email contains.

vs Social Media

One of the huge benefits of social media is the ability to interact with a huge audience in a number of different ways. 49% of all people in the UK use Facebook on a regular basis. In comparison, 91% off all adults use mobile phones. When you compare these two numbers, you can see the how many more people use mobile phones everyday as opposed to social media sites. While social media's user numbers are less than those who use mobile phones, it is still a substantial audience that you should be targeting for your small business as it is a platform that you can use for free. Whereas, mobile marketing will cost you a certain amount of money to first set up and then employ a third party company to send the SMS marketing messages on your behalf. .

While I'm not saying abandon online marketing and only market through mobile phones, you need to ensure that you spend a substantial amount of time researching the various marketing campaigns and tailoring your output to suit both platforms. Emails, social media and mobile messaging all have difference audiences which require a different style of output and a different type of message. Tailoring your message to each platform is going to give you the best possible chance of engaging as many customers for your online store as you can through each marketing tool.